


The Leech

by em_gnat



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, THEN DIES, pier pressure, random side character gets backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 20:37:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12540692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/em_gnat/pseuds/em_gnat
Summary: From alienage brat, to caged mage, to apostate, to gang leader: he's answered to other names but they call him Leech now.





	The Leech

The name his mother gave him was beautiful and curling, full of rises and falls like a forest path: some Dalish name she’d heard once and loved enough to say every day. He’d never seen a forest, only the dirty brick and mortar hovels of the alienage, and to tell the truth neither had she, in all her life.

Despite her good intentions, that well-meaning, lovely name was too long for the other alienage children to say. They’d chopped it into bits, until it was easy for them to hold in their mouths or spit out as they saw fit.

Mitran had hollered it too-- _screamed like a song-bird--_ when the fire had scorched him.

They’d both been eleven years old, and he new he could conjure fire in his hand. It had been very important that Mitran be impressed by him. He didn't know why it was important, it just _was_.

So, he’d pulled Mitran into an alley, saying he had a surprise. This time when he called the fire, though, it erupted in a gout of flame four feet high. Mitran’s scream echoed down the alleys. People came running, but it was too late. Every strand of hair was singed off, his right ear melted against the side of his bald head. When the templars came to march him off to the Circle, Mitran had pointed him out, and he believed he deserved to be taken away and locked up forever.

In the Circle, they gave him another name, but the templars just called him “mage”.

They’d called him that while they held him by his arms and pushed him into the ice cold water of the bath tub. They held him under until he stopped struggling, then pulled him back out, coughing and dripping. He slumped against the side of the tub, belching up water until his throat was raw.

“Did you have a good giggle when you singed my hem, magey? Did you have a good laugh?”

He _had_.

The templar was a thick-necked, blond brute named Ser Caust. He’d set the hem of Ser Caust’s robe alight, then watched with glee as the man had squealed, dashed around for a basin of water, and splashed himself full down the front, soaking the fine Chantry colors dark, as if he’d pissed himself.

“No, ser.” He hacked and coughed.

“I heard you. I heard you laughing.”

“I wasn't-”

Then Caust and his cronies held him under again.

When the Starkhaven Circle burned, they didn’t find Ser Caust’s body, and the mages were all shipped off to Kirkwall. It was the first time he’d left the city. He was still wearing his singed Circle robes, smelling of stale wood smoke and sneezing ashes.

Someone will tell you the tale of how those Starkhaven mages went missing for a week or so, only to be hunted down and dragged the rest of the way to the Kirkwall Gallows. Some of them were hung from the gate, executed as apostates. But not him. He slipped through the net: skinny, ugly, hunched in a seared cloak, scraps of rags wrapped around his feet. They’d all forgotten about _him._

He was shivering when he finally set foot in Kirkwall. The night-fog off the harbor cut through the thin fibers of his robes, smelling of rotting timbers and sewage. He ached from hours spent curled under a pile of wet sail cloth, but he’d had to wait until the crew cleared off the skiff for the night.

No shout of alarm went up as he eased over the side of the boat and onto the dock. No one called for him to _Stop, hold it there, mage!_ He breathed in a lungful of foul air, and at last felt...relief.

The feeling didn’t last.

Three city blocks later, the Redwater boys found him and carried him off to their hideout in an abandoned dockside warehouse. They laughed and bounced him on their shoulders, passing him from hand to hand like a prize lamb. Their leader was a bearded, pock-marked man with the coloring and build similar to Ser Caust.

He hated just looking at him.  

“What are we gonna do with you?” the Redwater leader asked, breathing rotgut fumes into his captive’s face.

“Sell him?” offered one of the boys. “Tevinter slavers might like him.”

“He’s made of sticks and naught else. We wouldn't get much for him.”

“Tie him to a post? Use him for target practice?”

“I’d like an elf, to shine my shoes.”

“I'd like that cloak.”

Someone snatched the cloak away so fast he couldn't even catch a-hold the hem.

“Them’s mages robes!”

“He’s a mage?”

“A mage would be damned helpful with our crew, don't you think?”

“ _Damned_ helpful.”

“Oy, mage, what you’re name?” the boss asked.

He wouldn't tell them.

They tried to coax it out of him, pushing jugs of whiskey against his lips, making him drink the rancid stuff until he was drunker than he’d ever been in his life. Still, they couldn’t get him to talk. Their leader finally grew impatient and dragged him to his knees beside a brazier,  threatening to cut his ears off if he didn't give his name.

As near as he could tell, he didn't _have_ a name anymore. His name was a danger to him. His phylactery had cracked and burned when the Circle collapsed to ashes, but a templar could still find him using something as simple as his name.

But the gang leader wouldn’t let up.

“Hey, I'm talking to you. I asked you a question, and when I ask, people answer. _What’s your name_?”

“I don't have one.”

“Sure as shit, you do. You think it’s some big important secret? You ain't important. We know that just by looking at you. _Tell me_.”

“If I'm not important then it doesn't matter what you call me, does it?”

One of the boys giggled: a bubbling, nervous sound. The Redwater boss was staring at him with a face frozen in confusion. To be tested by a scrap of a thing with bird bones and a crow-rasp of a voice was too overwhelming a concept for him. Well, gangsters and templars were alike, then, weren’t they? They never thought they’d be tested, least of all by _him._

The boss’s face convulsed. He reached down, grabbed him by the chin, and wrenched his face upward.

He lifted the knife close to the mage’s face. The glint of the blade reflected in the gang leader’s dark eyes.

“You think you’re smart, huh? Well, you’re gonna tell me, magey. One way or another.”

The blood started as a trickle, but it was enough. Decimus told him that. Decimus’s gift to distract the templars was a little trick of blood magic; not as flashy as fire, but quick and silent. He’d used it to make the templars dizzy and weak. Some of them had even fainted, as if gripped by anemia. But then Decimus and the others had left him. They’d just _run,_ and now he was here, losing an ear.

He still had that trick Decimus had taught him, though.

Tears came unbidden to his eyes, a whimper to his throat. The blood was dripping down the side of his neck, into his ear. He curled his fist by his side, summoning the magic. The place where the knife grooved into his flesh _burned._

The knife let up. The boss groaned, sat back, and blinked blearily at the cobweb soaked rafters high above . He shook his head, then toppled to the side, hitting the ground with his full face. He remained there, heavy and limp and utterly drained of life. The knife clattered from his hand.

The mage pushed the hair from his face and looked up to see the other men, crowded around on the edges of where the light touched, their eyes bright with horror, amazement, delight. Yes, there was _delight_ there, too. He rose steadily to his feet and studied them all in fierce silence.

One of them felt brave enough to sneak forward, pulled off a glove to test it on the boss’s colorless flesh. Shuddering, he snatched his fingers back.

“Cold and stiff, like he’s been dead a day.”

“No, _no. Can’t be._ ”

Other hands reached out. More shuddering, gasps, laughter.

“It’s true!”

“You drained ‘im like a leech.”

“Yeah, just like a leech.”

“That's what he is. A leech!”

Laughter.

“ _Our_ Leech!”

It was a good enough name. He’d had worse.

  
  


There’s an odd sense of elation that comes with being the leader of his own gang. And the Redwater gang is _truly_ his now, with the boys bowing and scraping to make him happy, half in fear but half in awe. Because of him, their reputation, their territory and their profits grow, just like the number of cuts on his hands and arms grow. Decimus’s blood-trick is _his_ now as well. He can drain a group of men in under five seconds, and he knows this for certain, because he’s done it.

Together, they clear out all the smaller gangs until they’re the big name on this side of the city. They get recruits coming in, eager to prove themselves to the Leech. And when they’re brought before him they see a gaunt and pale brown haired elf, wearing tattered circle robes, seated like a Starkhaven prince on a throne of shipping crates, his eyes hollow, his bare hands covered in small razor thin cuts.

Leech fears no one, _nothing_ , anymore. He takes all challenges to his prized position knowing he will win, until the challengers stop coming, for who in all of Kirkwall could ever hope to stand against him?

 

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone else remember Leech from the "clean-up the streets" side quests in Act 1? No? Well, here he is.


End file.
